Friday briefs

Awful: Some nutjob went insane at a theater and murdered twelve people at the premiere of Dark Knight Rises. Countdown to blaming it on the Tea Party or Republicans or NRA in 3, 2, 1….

Oh, well then it must be true: Hezbollah says they wouldn’t target tourists in a revenge attack for losing Mugniyeh. Sure, the CSM buys it, but then points out that Hezbollah had no compunction targeting a Jewish center in Buenos Aires. Right. We believe them, too.

But Hezbollah isn’t targeting tourists: There have been more than twenty foiled terror atacks around the world against Israel in fourteen months. See title.

Not even the WSJ is getting this right: Penguin is buying self-publisher Author Solutions, Inc., and the business journalists think that the major houses want to diversify into self-publishing.

The deal “constitutes tacit recognition that the legacy publishing model is severely challenged and may not work sometime in the foreseeable future,” said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Co., a New York-based publishing consultancy.

No. The deal constitutes a tacit recognition that they are buying a vanity press that rips off wannabes who are not as knowledgeable as some of us, charges outrageous prices for formatting, editing, and supplying cover art for your book, promises to market it and then does nothing but take your money. Penguin is declaring itself okay with ripping off the ignorant.

If the big houses truly wanted to diversify into self-publishing, they’d offer editing, copy editing, and cover design services for reasonable rates. These vanity presses are charging as much as $4000 for services I can find for a quarter of that.

Here he goes, lying about Israel again: Obama is trying to convince Floridians that he’s a big supporter of Israel. Uh-huh. Look at the great things he’s done, getting the Palestinians to the bargaining table, and working on a peace deal. Oh. Wait.